Marjorie Garber > Quotes

“If you have a dog, you will most likely outlive it; to get a dog is to open yourself to profound joy and, prospectively, to equally profound sadness.”
― Marjorie Garber

“We do literature a real disservice if we reduce it to knowledge or to use, to a problem to be solved. If literature solves problems, it does so by its own inexhaustibility, and by its ultimate refusal to be applied or used, even for moral good. This refusal, indeed, is literature's most moral act. At a time when meanings are manifold, disparate, and always changing, the rich possibility of interpretation--the happy resistance of the text to ever be fully known and mastered--is one of the most exhilarating products of human culture.”
― Marjorie Garber

“If any era should be aware of the temptations to rewrite history, it is our own.”
― Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare and Modern Culture

“Nostalgic memory is a sudden encounter with the thingness of the thing that has been forgotten, not the continuous desire for possessions, whether past, present, or future.”
― Marjorie Garber

“It's often the material things that provide the essence of memory.”
― Marjorie Garber

“Prospero is man-the-artist, or man-the-scholar: Ariel and Caliban represent his ethereal and material selves—the one airy, imaginative, and swift; the second earthy, gross, and appetitive.”
― Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“But if we create our own Shakespeare, it is at least as true that the Shakespeare we create is a Shakespeare that has, to a certain extent, created us.”
― Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“There are men of character in the U.S. Congress, both House and Senate. There are women of character, too. But the evidence for "character" needs to be something other than the iteration of the word itself.”
― Marjorie Garber, Character: The History of a Cultural Obsession

“Avoiding the Scylla of the nunnery, Hermia sails dangerously close to the Charybdis of Titania's lust for the ass-headed Bottom, but emerges safely, and somewhat more self-knowledgeably, into the orderly harbor of marriage.”
― Marjorie Garber, Coming of Age in Shakespeare

“These debates framed and energized educational and philosophical schemes throughout that century and well into the following one. What was at stake was in part the very divergent, often intrinsically antithetical set of meanings that constellated around, and crystallized in, the concept of the word "character." Was it intrinsic or acquired? Could it be taught? Was a "strong character" one that acted or one that withheld? And, above all, could it change? For, if human character could be changed- or could change itself- for the better, was it not the obligation of society and the individual, the schools and the home, to do what they could to "improve" it?”
― Marjorie Garber, Character: The History of a Cultural Obsession